November was always tough for Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. The reason never needed explaining: President Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. Jackie — those of us alive in the 1960s need no other identifiers — was sitting just inches away from her husband in the open presidential car when the sniper's bullet shattered his head.

That was 51 years ago. Jackie has been dead 20 years, laid to rest next to her husband at Arlington National Cemetery. Their son, John F. Kennedy Jr., has been dead for 15, his ashes scattered in the Atlantic near where the small plane he was piloting went down off Martha's Vineyard, killing him, his wife and her sister.

But public interest in the Kennedy family hasn't dimmed. New biographies of Jackie and JFK Jr. promising fresh perspectives on their often-told lives were both released Oct. 28 just as the anniversary of the assassination was coming 'round again. Coincidence? Perhaps. But any smart publisher knows timing is everything — and it's always in November that America's collective memory — and press attention — turns back to the assassinated president and his family. What better moment, from a publishing viewpoint, to release books about the president's widow and his son?

The timing, I have to admit, does seem justifiable here. For the shots fired in Dallas echo through the stories told in Barbara Leaming's "Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story" and Christopher Andersen's "The Good Son: JFK Jr. and the Mother He Loved." Both wife and son had to cope with a daunting legacy charged with many painful what-might-have-beens, fight to move past a tragedy that had so brutally altered their lives, and search for something akin to peace as they tried to move forward. That Jackie managed to make it at all under intense public scrutiny seems a minor miracle.

"I think it is after going through a rather difficult time, I consider myself comparatively sane. I am proud of that," she is reported to have replied when asked at a 1980 dinner party to name her greatest achievement in life.

Leaming, who highlights the anecdote, examines that "rather difficult time" and the remainder of Jackie's post-Dallas life through the prism of post-traumatic stress disorder — a condition not understood as such in the 1960s. Jackie had it rough — and she suffered in public.

Family, friends and even her fellow Americans wondered why Jackie couldn't get over it, Leaming writes. Why the talk of suicide? Why the tears — where was that stiff upper lip so admired in the days immediately after the assassination? Why did the Widow Kennedy seem to grow even more regal with every passing day? Why was she clashing with author William Manchester in court over "The Death of a President," a book she herself had asked for? And, perhaps most urgently of all, why would Jackie topple off the Kennedy pedestal into the arms of a man like Aristotle Onassis, the much older, and shorter, Greek shipping magnate?

A diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder, particularly a posthumous one, may not provide a neat answer to every question about how and why Jackie led her life after Dallas, but I think Leaming's thoughtful work does offer important insight into the former first lady's actions, especially in those turbulent days of the mid- and late-1960s when it seemed everyone and everything had been cut loose to sink or swim.

Leaming is a respected biographer whose earlier works have ranged from the lives of Rita Hayworth and Katharine Hepburn to the final years of Winston Churchill. She wrote an earlier book about Jackie, 2001's "Mrs. Kennedy: The Missing History of the Kennedy Years." She is respectful and understanding of her subject, tracing the 64-year arc of Jackie's eventful life. Leaming doesn't shy away from her subject's faults but doesn't pounce gleefully on them, either. Nor does she wade much into the salacious gossip of the tabloids.

Yet, there's a certain distance, a remove of sorts, to this book. Some of it is just the passage of time — much of the action takes place nearly a half-century ago — and many of the major figures have passed from the scene. But Leaming also doesn't evoke fully the zeitgeist of the period, which was at once exciting, rebellious, violent and often bewildering.

As wife of the assassinated president, Jackie was news, a source of speculation and often imitation — even Wonder Woman sported a Jackie-like mane in a 1968 makeover designed to make her more relevant to the times. Tabloids speculated about Jackie's romances or spread rumors that, like Elvis a decade or so later, JFK was really still alive but hidden away. And while the widowed Jackie was often unfairly cast as some sort of saint — there are even ceramic vases of her head looking eerily like the Virgin Mary — Leaming writes that "America's patience with her haughty attitudes and locutions had begun to fray." People, frankly, had grown weary of the assassination and the pain Jackie couldn't shrug away.

That pain was shared with Jackie's immediate family and the larger Kennedy clan as well. Christopher Andersen's "The Good Son" shows how John F. Kennedy Jr. spent much of his life trying to ease or shield his mother from the enduring hurt she had suffered while he himself tried to cope with the enormous legacy of a father he had hardly known. As Andersen points out, the young Kennedy would admit that there were times when he couldn't figure out if the memories he recalled of his father where his own or stories relayed by family and friends for as long as he could remember.

If Leaming's book on Jackie can be divided roughly into two parts, with the split occurring on Nov. 22, 1963, then in Andersen's book the natural split falls on May 19, 1994, when Jackie died in her New York City apartment. It was then that the son Jackie had so carefully — and controllingly when it came to women and work — raised turned truly into his own man at the age of 33.

"A person never really becomes a grown-up until he loses both his parents," JFK Jr. is quoted by Andersen as saying. That he would go on to marry at last, castigate some of his cousins publicly for their behavior, launch his own publishing venture, George, and begin considering a political career are all testaments to that. Yet, he would be dead just five years later — his promise agonizingly unrealized.

Like Leaming, Andersen is no stranger to the Kennedys. He authored 2013's "These Few Precious Days: The Final Year of Jack with Jackie." In 2003 there was "Sweet Caroline: Last Child of Camelot." "The Day John Died," more of a full biography than a simple recounting of JFK Jr.'s death, was published in 2000. Onetime senior editor of People magazine, and author of many best-selling biographies mostly focused on royalty, either Kennedy, Hollywood, British or rock 'n' roll, Andersen has an ear for the telling anecdote and writes in a lively, gossipy style. Leaming may use a 1966 New York Times headline, "Mrs. Kennedy 'Irked'," to illustrate Jackie's pretensions, but Andersen cuts to the quick, vividly, by noting that her son and his friends referred to her as "Big Lady," a title conferred — by a disgruntled Kennedy butler.

His material also seems less dated because, well, it is. Andersen can set much of his action in the 1980s and 1990s and lard it with such boldface and still-active figures as Madonna, the Clintons, Sean Penn, assorted Kennedy cousins and Sarah Jessica Parker.

While the jacket flap of "The Good Son" reads like a tabloid editor's dream — bullet points highlight such "startling new details" as "the premonitions that terrified Jackie about John's fate," and "the shocking never-before-told secrets about John's own turbulent marriage and his senseless death" — the book really, truly, focuses on what the jacket calls "the unbreakable bond between a mother and her child" both of whom led lives "tested by history and tragedy."

How Jackie and JFK Jr.. managed to survive, alone and together, is the stuff of these two new biographical works that manage to tell stories told before in a compelling, fresh fashion.